HPR's The Conversation: interview on _Jack London is Dead_

This morning I talked to Chris Vandercook on Hawai`i Public Radio about our forthcoming anthology of writing by white poets (and two fiction writers).  You can access the December 18 interview here.  And the book is here.  Chris was intrigued by the subject matter, the conversation that never really happens in Hawai`i among artists, namely what it's like to write while Caucasian.

Tomorrow my family and I leave for a 17 day trip to Cambodia. I hope to be able to post here and there, but we will be in rural areas and in no-star hotels (we're going with our friend Hongly Khuy and his group of local Cambodian Baptists), so I may have to do my writing old-style, with pen and paper. For the nonce.

Happy holidays, everyone.

Our new website

Tinfish Press is pleased to announce our new website. Click on it!

The process of moving from our old website to the new one was long and arduous.  Jeff Sanner was the designer, Luanna Pescador our intern (who did the moving from one to the other site).  On our web committee, which met several times at Coffee Talk and Glazier's Coffee in Honolulu were my colleague, John Zuern, and future Tinfish poet, J. Vera Lee.  I so appreciate their eyes, their opinions, their hard work, none of it for pay.

We have two new books.  Ya-Wen Ho's book is available in material form, and Jack London is Dead: Contemporary Euro-American Poetry of Hawai`i (and some stories) will be arriving very soon.  I will be on HPR's The Conversation tomorrow to talk about that last book. Podcast to follow.

There are numerous freebies on this new site, including the entire set of Retro Chapbooks from 2010-2011, as well as a pdf of Sarith Peou's Corpse Watching.

Please help us out by buying books and by hitting the donate button at the bottom of the page.  Any amount helps.  Jack London is our biggest book yet, our most expensive to produce & to ship.

Forthcoming books from Tinfish Press

 Tinfish Press will be rolling out our new website soon.  Many thanks to those who are making it happen: Jeff Sanner, Luanna Pescador, John Zuern, and Vera Lee.

Here are two books you will find on that new site (as well as the one that is still running at tinfishpress.com):

TO PURCHASE THESE BOOKS, GO TO http://tinfishpress.com, FIND A PURCHASE BUTTON, THEN GO TO THE END OF A LONG LIST.  Our new website will make this all a lot easier.


Coming soonest:

last edited [insert time here], by Ya Wen Ho

Ya Wen Ho's poetry sits on the (pointed, unsturdy) edge of the spoken and the digitized word. In last edited [insert time here], she presents performance texts based on google searches, drawing out accidents that occur when words crack and blend together. In his work on Shakespeare, Garrett Stewart termed this process “lexical bucklings and permutations.” Hence, for Ho, “18 is XVII- / '(aye)_-da' translated into English means 'to take a / sound / beating_two eggs and a wife together,” or “anger / 'issues'_rhymes with 'tissues,' which can either refer to / a class of soft, absorbent, disposable papers or / an ensemble_of jazz musicians played at his mother's / funeral_home directors earn on average...” This short book is a romp through contemporary life, mining the spot where virtual and actual cannot be wrenched apart, except between the syllables of quickly streaming words.

ISBNs: 978-0-9824203-9-3; 0-9824203-9-0

43 pages, $13

Sample:

from “today I will stop procrastinating and clear my desk”:

desk_top pot plants thrive in her new corner

office_politics destroys many a work

ethic_ally I find the planting of trees with fermentable fruit in public places objectionable for the sake of alcohol-poisoned

birds_of a feather flock

together_together

to gather_one ounce of rose essential oil requires

60,000 fresh

roses_are red, violets are blue, sugar is 1sweet and so are

You_tube is a hugely popular video-sharing platform. Other notable examples include Dailymotion, Flickr, Photobucket, Vimeo and

more_than 15,000 works are held within the collection of the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o

Tama_gotchi is a virtual digital pet.

Poet bio:

Ya-Wen Ho graduated from her BA/BFA(Hons) at the University of Auckland in 2012 and  works as a writer, editor and independent publisher of chapbooks and zines. She has previously been published in The Deformed, Bravado,JAAM and Poetry New Zealand.

Blurb

Ya-wen Ho's last edited [insert time here] sits in a complex place, and how fortunate for us that this poet negotiates these intricacies with smooth turns between playful, intelligent, and funny. Ya-Wen Ho's poetry stream of conscious word play rushes us through everything from pop culture to population control in China to PhDs driving taxis asking us to try and not "detonate the sleeping dog" and have a fabulous time while (not) doing it.

Lyz Soto, author of Eulogies, Co-Executive Director of Youth Speaks Hawaiʻi, and Co-Founder of Pacific Tongues

Coming in the new year:

-->
JACK LONDON IS DEAD: CONTEMPORARY EURO-AMERICAN POETRY OF HAWAI`I
(AND SOME STORIES)
Susan M. Schultz, Editor
Tinfish Press

ISBN: 978-0-9824203-7-9
0-9824203-7-4
Copyright 2013
$20

 Many white (or, as this anthology calls them, Euro-American) poets have made Hawai`i home, either permanently or for a significant portion of their lives. But in a place marked by communities of writers marked as Local or Asian or Indigenous, there is no such community of Euro-American writers. Euro-American poetry seems to exist at two poles, either as the writing still to be resisted by non-white writers, or as work that comes from somewhere else, and is thus not relevant to Hawai`i’s literature.  This anthology features seventeen writers of poetry (and some prose), as well as their statements about being a Euro-American writer in Hawai`i. It looks at what happens after Euro-American literature has been de-centered, de-canonized.  Jack London is Dead presents writers whose work has been deeply influenced by Hawai`i, and whose poetry adds valuable voices to a complicated mix of ethnic cultures. Featured in this volume are the more experimental of the myriad Euro-American voices among Hawai`i’s many exciting writers.



Contributors: Scott Abels, Diana Aehegma, Margo Berdeshevsky, Jim Chapson, M. Thomas Gammarino, Shantel Grace, Jaimie Gusman, Endi Bogue Hartigan, Anne Kennedy, Tyler McMahon, Evan Nagle, Janna Plant, Susan M. Schultz, Eric Paul Shaffer, Julia Wieting, Rob Wilson, Meg Withers.

Blurbs:
 To contested questions of agency and authenticity in contemporary Hawai`i, this collection makes an important contribution. By clearing a public space for White authors to think (and write) through issues of a positionality compromised by the ruptures of historical violence and present day colonialism, editor Susan M. Schultz has done a brave thing. There are those who will object to this project by challenging the right of non-Indigenous “others” to write about Hawai`i. However, the sensitivity of featured authors to the complex instability of their own standing as White writers in Hawai`i offers a nuanced, layered response to that call of challenge. Without closing our eyes to history, without denying any legacy of oppression or cooptation, and as citizens of the 21^st century with so much at stake for a shared planet, it seems to me that this conversation may be one of the most important and difficult, yes, but necessary ones before us.

--Caroline Sinavaiana, author of Alchemies of Distance; Side Effects, A Pilgrimage; and co-author of Mohawk/Samoa: Transmigrations.

The volume exemplifies ways in which ethnicity and ethnic identities are indeed fluid and historically contingent. Through this “experiment,” we see a poignant example of how the positionality of ethnic identities tends to shift quite quickly when one factors in the political, social and cultural circumstances in which such identities are formed and experienced in the contexts of power, discrimination, and belonging.

--Elisa Joy White, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies, University of Hawai`i at Manoa, author of Modernity, Freedom and the African Diaspora: Dublin, New Orleans, Paris

This anthology sets itself the ambitious task of convening a group of white (Euro-American) writers for the purposes of a poetic conversation, both with Euro-American and Hawaiian literary traditions and cultural histories. In convening this assortment of writers – which it hesitates to label a community - its project is not so much to map a genealogy of whiteness as to open out new perspectives on white writers who may find themselves inhabiting positions as both majority and minority practitioners, who may index white hegemony while simultaneously being marked by a lack of legitimacy. The writers represented in this book defy easy categorisation in spite of the apparent self-evidence of the subtitle.

--Anne Brewster, Associate Professor, School of English, Media and Performing Arts at University of New South Wales

While many of the writers are stylistically “experimental,” aiming to convey new experiences of being, the Introduction and Author Statements provide inviting roadmaps that actively include readers—a poignant reversal of the theme of racial and cultural exclusion often expressed here. Jack London is Dead is essential reading for anyone interested in discovering the best of contemporary writing. How we mythologize ourselves and others, the difficulties of expressing our identities in language, the relationship between humans and nature, the sense of being and not-being part of where we are, the complexities of aesthetic heritage—these are abiding themes of art addressed by the exhilaratingly varied writers in this anthology. This volume feels both rooted in a place and rooted in its creators. This collection will be a classic.

--Lauri Ramey, author of Slave Songs and the Birth of African American Poetry, Director of the

Center for Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, California State University, Los Angeles

Both books were designed by Allison Hanabusa.

A sestina!

My students in History of Poetic Form seem especially intrigued by the sestina--two of them wrote their own, unbidden.  So our last class was devoted to generating six words (out of 20 or so), forming small groups, and then writing sestinas.  The students came up with wonderful end words, several related to the Halloween season.  You can imagine the pies made of phalanges, the manatees in graveyards, the zombies in Paris.  Each group performed their sestina.  The class was so successful that I'm taking them pie tomorrow, pumpkin, not phalange.

manatee
graveyard
phalanges
pie
Paris
zombie

And here is the sestina I wrote. I feel very sheepish in noting that I've never before written a sestina.  But what fun!

Manatees & Zombies in a Parisian Graveyard

A horrible, hot Florida vacation. All I saw was a manatee
who lolled in the rancid water like a zombie
trolling around a 19th century graveyard,
all the bodies decayed, except for some stray phalanges--
is that a word you'd use in Paris,
I wondered, when you're asked for tart, or pie?

We drove past Pres. Nixon's favorite bakery for key lime pie
still seeing in our mind's eye the bulbous manatee
wearing a whisker as stylish as any Paris
haberdasher sews, the slow-moving zombie
drifting among fans of hands wearing their phalanages
underneath gloves as gray as any graveyard

when, through the hard rain, we spied a graveyard
and decided it was just the place to eat our pie,
taking care to keep clean our smudged phalanges
lest they get lost like dice, like a manatee
that earned a big prize as Zombie
of the Month at a prime cafe in Paris--

I do so miss the Spring in gay Paris,
Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison in Pere Lachaise graveyard.
Pedestrians near the Eiffel Tower look like zombies
out in search of a proverbial pie
made of cherries, apples, strawberries, or manatee
jam that really stickies your phalanges.

You! with the oddly bent phalanges,
your arthritic hands like a bare tree in Paris
that one winter we went from manatee
to zabronkey in the dictionary's graveyard,
slowing down only once for pie
and a hard look at the word zombie.

Zombie Land's the new Disney, where Phalanges 

is a rollercoaster ride, the Pie a bird in Paris, and climate 

change a graveyard for my late pet, Manatee.

I'm not sure my last three lines follow the directions very well, but there you have it.

Bob Holman & R. Zamora Linmark rock the classrooms of UHM

[Bob Holman, top; Zack Linmark & Amalia Bueno, bottom]


The heavens aligned yesterday in a marvelous twofer of guests in my classes, English 353 (History of Poetic Form) and English 273 (Documentary Writing).  The early class--it's an 8:30 class in a city with too much traffic in an engineering building classroom with no windows, dingy white paint, and aged plastic coated desks--found themselves confronted by Bob Holman, slam poet, poetry enthusiast, defender of endangered languages. I'd suggested he was welcome simply to talk story, and that my students lit up most when we did a unit on signifyin, rap and performance poetry. And perform he did. The opening act was Holman as Benjamin Bratt (6' 2" white guy) as Mikey Pinero (5' 2" Puerto Rican guy). Holman played both roles, Pinero as himself, Bratt as Pinero. Then he played himself--older hipster, slam poet, charismatic teacher--to a group of students wearied by a long semester and still smarting from a recent unit on the elegy.  (I just got off Facebook where Kathy Lou Schultz was lamenting that her students may never come back to her class after reading elegies.) 

Holman recounted his ur-moment as an oral poet, when he found himself dancing to a poem by Kurtis Blow, "These are the breaks." One student in class helped him chant the poem. He then riffed into the following topics: the sound of Lower East Side in Nuyorican English (Loeesida); how he started memorizing poems after his first attempt to read a poem beneath lights that flashed too much for him to see his own text; how what you do if you are a poet is what a poet is; his work with PBS's United States of Poetry, which included videotaping Lois-Ann Yamanaka's "Boss of the Food"; his experiences with a blues poet; signifyin' two levels of a single story, one X-rated, one not; orality not as poetic form but as consciousness; Homer; how he was left out of the second edition of the Ron Padgett book of forms we're using in the class; the question of how many languages there are, and the fact that we're losing one language every two weeks, and are slated to lose 1/2 of all languages in the next 60 years; corporate global capitalism; his study with a griot; how poets are paid in West Africa; the difference between an epic that is "long long long" (oral) and "very long" (written); how a poem shifts from day to day because each day is different, according to his griot mentor; Hawaiian orality and literacy; digital consciousness; how literature comes through the body; multi-linguality as a natural tradition; kids as sponges; the sadness of being the last speaker of a language; talk story vs. talk stink; how he was left out of edition #2 of Padgett; rainforests and cancer treatments, both of them being life forms out of control; Welsh; definitions of poet; verb tenses in the Amazon; ecology of consciousness; his courses on "exploding texts" (Columbia) and "poetry census" (NYU)

and then he was gone.

Zack (aka R. Zamora) Linmark came to my early afternoon class, where we've been reading his new novel, LECHE.  The course is on documentary writing, so the mix of history, postcards, tourist tips, and other documents, real and imagined, made the book fit the syllabus nicely.  Many of the students are local Filipino, and most of them are from Hawai`i, so the book is close to home for them. (Its central character, Vince, comes to Hawai`i from the Philippines as a child, and is now returning for a visit, only to realize no one in the Philippines considers him anything other than American.)

After my students had finished taunting me over my Cardinals' pummeling at the hands of the Giants, Zack began talking about homecoming narratives, starting with those by Homer; about how the motherland often rejects the traveler; how he detests linear narratives; how digressions and plot are related; how it took him 12 fucking years to write the book, which he started as a UH student; how it only took him one year to write Rolling the Rs (a book he says he detests); how LECHE is a prequel and a sequel to that book; how this novel relates to Gulliver's Travels, which the students have not read; how Vince is Gulliver; how he also uses elements of Dante's Inferno; how he used Swift's model in the long long scene of Vince trying to take a shit but finding no toilet paper; about how Vince's story is developed through nightmares, tourist tips, and postcards sent home; how he uses 3rd person, 2nd person, 1st person and dialogues in the book (this fit in well with the fiction-writing tips Donovan Colleps had offered the class period before); how difficult it was to divorce himself from the main character; how much research he did on history, popular culture, the US military, superstitions; how he has no audience when he writes, but means for more than Filipinos to enjoy the book; how place is not setting but character; Kalihi, Manila; how he had to become a sociologist/anthropologist to write the book; the signage he saw in Manila ("Elizabeth Tailoring"); on how his next novel will be set in Tokyo, a city he only lived in for six months; how you need eight pairs of eyes in Manila; how the energy of his prose is intended to echo the frenzy of Manila; how to develop character through dreams; a dream he had about shitting in his pants while naked; the reading his friend, Justin Chin, gave of this dream; procrastination; satire; how to spell "da kine" or "da kind"; how people don't speak in italics; how texting is unfixed, like language

and then he was gone.

An open letter to Wanda A. Adams of the _Star-Advertiser_

This morning's Star-Advertiser (10/14/12) contained a review of the 100th imprint of Bamboo Ridge Journal of Hawai`i Literature and the Arts. Penned by Wanda A. Adams, the awkward headline, "Points of entry are myriad in 100th Bamboo Ridge issue," is prescient. For Adams's review contains several lines of thinking that prevent much of the literary world in Hawai`i from moving anywhere but closer to the comforts of home.  She takes swipes at experimental writing, nay, even poetry and short stories, acknowledging her preference for "long, character-rich novels and deeply researched non-fiction" of the realist kind.

The review begins with a note of comfort: 100 is a pleasing number, Adams writes, because it's so round, so base-10, and "the least you can spend on a good dinner for two" (where on earth does she eat?). While she notes that compared to earlier issues of the journal, this one contains "more troubling places and no fear of going there; less nostalgia, more nuance," she then eases back into well-worn slippahs.  Let me quote: "Some works are so spare and experimental, I frankly couldn't understand them. Others fit like an old slipper, worn ball-and-heel grooves, straps that slide between the toes, so familiar they're like wearing nothing. You put on these pieces and you know just where they'll slide over your consciousness and tuck into your experiences."

No nostalgia there, but also no nuance. Failing to make the link that could be had between "experimental, spare" and "less nostalgia, more nuance," Adams promptly runs back to those pieces "so familiar they're like wearing nothing." Granted she's writing for a deadline (though the issue has been out for weeks now), but am I not alone in NOT wanting to read work so comfortable that it seems not to exist? "There's more enterprise in walking naked," Yeats wrote, but his nakedness was not dreamed of in this philosophy.

Adams finds a moment in Albert Saijo's work--which I'm delighted to see Bamboo Ridge has published, likely against Saijo's own posthumous wishes!--that rings a bell for her: "I WANT THERE TO BE NO DIFF BETWEEN WHAT I THINK AND WHAT I SPEAK . . . NO BELLE LIT IDEAL--JUST UTTERANCE--LIKE BOW WOW LIKE MOO." That mini-rant of Saijo's may seem to chime with Adams's notion that writing should fit like a slipper, but of course it absolutely does not.  Saijo's work is searing, angry, strips naked our notions of authority ("DIRECTED THINKING LIES AT THE BOTTOM OF ALL OUR ILLS"), decorum, pretentiousness, and yes, comfort. Saijo's nakedness, the big caps that are all revelation, no hiddenness, is an ornery stew. NO BELLE LIT, but also no BULL SHIT.

Still, the reviewer slogs on, quoting from some slips of paper she used to take notes, which bring her back to her discomforts and possible ways to justify them. She admits to preferring fiction to poetry, development to spareness, then comes around to a defense of poetry that might make Shelley et al flip in their watery graves: "But this 280-page anthology proves short works can be valuable scraps, vital scraps, even if elusive, like the piece of paper with the phone number on it you just have to find. At best they leave you with a thought, an impression, an uncomfortable feeling, an aha that flirts with your mind's edge, sometimes for days." As someone who tries to show her students that the telephone number on a scrap of paper is found poetry, I find myself oddly in agreement with Adams. Yes, the short form is vital. And yes, fragments are a significant literary form, one that opens poems to the reader, "sometimes for days"!, but "scraps"??

My problem with this review is not the review itself; god knows, I've read enough of these in the past two decades to see them coming, predict the next paragraph, realize that anything but easy, narrative, non-scraps will please most local journalists. But really? In a place so complicated, with so many stresses, so many competing (or neglected) communities, is this the best one can come up with?  I am not one to savage Bamboo Ridge: I know far too well how hard they've worked, and how much shit they've caught over the years, sometimes for good reason, other times because it's easy and comfortable to call them "bourgeois." And I also know that the "darknesses" of this issue, the ones Adams brings up and then neglects, are crucial. Amalia Bueno writes in this issue about women in prison; Wing Tek Lum writes about the Nanjing Massacre; even the typical BR-funny stuff ain't so funny if you really listen to it. I'm looking at you, Lee Cataluna.

So yes, this issue deserved a better review. But, more importantly, Hawai`i's literary scenes merit better journalism and listeners with fresher ears, like the ex-UH football player I met at the reception after one of the readings for this issue, spoke with some eloquence, in response to what he'd heard, about his own growing up in Ka`u, where a local politician had tried to impose a rocket project, only to be turned back by citizens he later savaged at a talk in Honolulu. It's not even that we need to read more work published outside the state, it's that we need to read, and attend to, the work right in front of us.


Editor's note: This issue included three of my prose poems from Memory Cards.

Documentary Poetry & Being in the World

Several years ago, when we still walked our kids to the neighborhood school in the morning, my husband did a photography project he called "sidewalk blog." Each morning he took a photograph of the sidewalk, one of those concrete suburban walkways that runs parallel to the asphalt road. Looking back nearly at random I find these photographs, some of which he thinks I took. No matter:

--A soap bubble
--A bic lighter
--A worm
--Some leaves
--Metal cover
--Pre-paid movie card

And then are the photos that he printed out and hung on the wall, among them:

--A red curb, fluted cement gutter, leaves
--Manhole cover filled in with multi-colored leaves, twigs
--What appears to be a moon crater

The term isn't used in this way, but these are "found photographs," images in which the world rises to meet us, unmediated (except in the angle of the shot). Photographs like these may prove a corrective to what happens when introductory level poetry students are asked to "write a poem." Even after setting up topics that accentuated the documentary nature of the course (English 273: Docuwriting), most students succumbed to the lure of "Poetry." Instead of looking at the world as it is, they did dervish dances of mediation, remediation, imposing their thoughts, feelings and (alas) cliches on their subjects.

 

But when my Ph.D. apprentice, No`u Revilla, asked these students to take their own photographs of walks they'd been on, they came up with many stunning images.  The ratty stuffed bear who lives under a bench beside Kuykendall Hall, the stylized image of a man's face at the bottom of another bench. They see the world, but can't describe it.

We've set to work removing the veil of anxious subjectivity and clotted multi-syllables from their writing. Having asked them earlier in the class to write verbal portraits of each other (an exercise that caused great consternation), we more recently asked them to compose "verbal portraits or photographs" and to post them on the class blog. I asked them to go for a walk and to take nothing (no phone, no iPod, no iPad, nothing) except for a pad and pen. When they saw an image that they would otherwise take a picture of, they were to stop, sit down, and write the image as they saw it. No commentary. The ticket should emerge from the sidewalk not as evidence of "a lonely night," but as a ratty piece of paper with the numbers 1446-2023 on it.

The results have been good, sometimes stunning.  One that begins with two women talking about pronouns (yes, sound images work, too) includes this series of vivid lines:

Red flowers in clusters, no in umbels,

Behind a brown, rusting fence,
Beneath black lamp posts.
Rows of shrubs line the boundaries of the grey building.
A man in pink picks a leaf.

There are tables shaped as hexagons; there's a girder; there are roofs, pigeons, canoes, a baseball field, motorcycles, a woman in a tank top. Suddenly, we see what we see when we look at the world without so many distractions (such as our electronic devices, our monkey minds). 

Alfred Corn asked on facebook the other day whether we read Stevens or Williams. I responded that I read both, but teach Williams more. In college, when I took a couple of courses from Alfred, I was enamored of Stevens. My poems were full of blue musical instruments, fluttering ideas, lots of ifs. He told me to try to write a poem so utterly like Stevens that I might cure myself of the tendency; at another point, he pointed to Chieftain Iffucan as my muse. I learned later on to appreciate the value of writing about the world as something that was not so much an hallucination behind the eye, but (scary thought when you're 20) a place that confronts the eye, is not the I.

That this is a spiritual, as well as a quasi-scientific, discovery brings the opposition into focus for me, if focus is a kind of synthesis, as I believe it is. This is what I learned best in writing about my mother, that to watch her and to describe her decline as it happened, was difficult precisely because it meant pulling away the veils of my own emotions, memories, desires. Talking yesterday to a colleague in Family Resources with whom I will be teaching a class next semester on Alzheimer's, I was gratified to hear her talk about this act of witness (of a parent's dementia) as one that involves pulling away from personal desires, and of settling into the present tense. Meaning comes after, but only when words themselves can be seen as precisely as that bear who sits under the concrete bench, a companion for the black cat who eats there.